


good girls better

by seventhswan



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Internalized Misogyny, Multi, Season/Series 02 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-20
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2019-02-04 13:08:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12771741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/seventhswan/pseuds/seventhswan
Summary: Jonathan picks her up at eight, in cords and a sweater that brings out the gold in his dark eyes. He jingles his keys in his hand while he exchanges a few words with her parents (just bowling; yeah, I haven’t been since Will was a kid, we thought it might be kind of funny; my college applications are almost done, thanks for asking). Nancy’s mom looks at him with the same expression she gets when a rare bird comes to eat at her bird feeder – torn between fascination, tender pity and self-satisfaction.





	good girls better

**Author's Note:**

> Set after season two, and so may contain spoilers. 
> 
> Warnings for: internalized misogyny.

Nancy lies awake four nights in a row, rehearsing it.

_Steve, it’s been great, but -_

_Steve, you deserve someone who’ll really -_

_Steve, it’s not you, it’s me -_

_Steve, sometimes the pressure of being your girlfriend, of being so – so looked at all the time, it makes me feel like I’m going to have to pack up all my stuff and drive three hundred miles across the county into the wilderness, where there’s no one else around, and just stand in a clearing and scream at all the trees -_

_Steve, I just think we’re going in different directions -_

|

The first time Nancy came to Ally’s house, she was six years old and couldn’t understand why the photos that lined the hallway only showed Ally, and Ally and her mom, and then Ally again; just the two of them repeating, like a wallpaper pattern.

She looks at the photos again now, following Ally through the den and into the kitchen. Ally missing teeth, Ally with an ill-advised bowl cut, Ally’s mother squeezing her tight.

Ally and her mom repaint the walls in their house all the time. It’s a Saturday thing. At the minute, the kitchen has one raspberry wall facing a yellow one, with an orchid mural done in fragile, tentative strokes.

The popcorn pops in the skillet. Nancy plucks a piece and puts it in her mouth, even though it’s too hot.

Ally’s bedroom has paper swans propped all over the shelves, and a solitary Stevie Nicks poster on the ceiling.

“Here,” Ally says, once Nancy has shucked her shoes off, and hands Nancy one of the bowls she’s carrying. Sweet and salted mixed together, like always. Ally gets the ketchup bottle out of her back pocket and drizzles it neatly over her own bowl.

“Ugh,” Nancy says, wrinkling up her nose. Ally rolls her eyes up towards the hem of the stubby, uneven bangs she cut herself last week.

“That’s gratitude for you,” Ally says. Nancy could cry with the familiarity of it.

They lean on the bed and half-watch some actress walk down a high school corridor in a short pink skirt. Nancy’s hair has never looked that good a day in her life.

“So anyway,” Ally says, like she’s interrupting, “that band night next weekend? We should go.”

Nancy rolls up onto her elbow. The actress is at the mall. Her mouth moves, but the soundtrack drowns out what she’s saying.

“Wait,” Nancy says. “What happened to the fishing trip?”

“Mom and Ron broke up,” Ally says. She won’t meet Nancy’s eye, and one of her shoulders is pitched higher than the other. “So. You know.”

Nancy sags back down against the comforter, flat on her back. She throws up an arm to shield her eyes from the glare of Ally’s ceiling light.

“Nance?”

The light leaks around her arm like a badly-exposed photograph.

“So now it’s like, you just have to pretend Ron never existed? Why is it that when you stop dating someone, it’s like they’re dead?”

“Nance –“

“No, it’s messed up.“

Ally pauses the movie with a vicious flick of the remote. Even caught off-guard, the actress looks perfect.

“Obviously,” Ally says, her voice hard. “That’s _life_ , Nancy.”

Nancy swallows. 

“Sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry.”

Ally turns sharp green eyes on her. If Nancy turned off the light, they might glow in the dark.

“What’s this really about, Nance?“

Nancy puts the popcorn bowl down on the floor. The picture from the VHS starts to flicker, splitting the actress into three ghostly versions of herself that glitch across the screen.

“I’ve just been thinking,“ she says.

Ally sits up so quickly that Nancy feels the jolt travel through the mattress.

“Jeez, Nancy,” Ally says. “Don’t push the button.”

Nancy wants to push it. She wants to watch the whole thing go _boom_.

“I’ll help you shave your head,” Ally says. God, it must show on Nancy’s face, worse than she realizes. “Or dye it all purple. We’ll go get you a tattoo or something, or cut holes in all your jeans. Just – just hold on to Harrington, all right?”

Ally has a secret girlfriend who lives in Utah and sends her long, coded letters. Ally has all of them pinned up on a noticeboard beside her bed, even though to anyone looking, they don’t make any sense.

The urge to cry rears up again, catches in Nancy’s throat. She blinks hard against it, and unpauses the movie.

|

In the end, she does it the worst possible way she can. Turns out, when you hit a self-destruct button, it’s more of an implosion. Everything just caves in.

|

It’s fun, being back at the start, once she’s far enough away from the site of her worst – from the worst Halloween party in the world. Once Steve’s betrayed face is far enough back in her rearview mirror.

With Steve, by the time it was over she knew everything – what he liked most about her, what he liked to see her wear. It’s… it makes her feel something, the way Jonathan’s eyes crinkle up at the sight of her in a green dress. Steve liked her best in pink.

_I waited for you_ , she told him, that night in the motel. She’d mostly said it because she’d thought that if this was a movie, that was what she would say. She’d thought that was something he might like, just like the green dress. Had she waited? She’d been waiting for Jonathan, in some form, for years. She hadn’t waited very well.

|

“Sometimes I have this fantasy,” Nancy says, rolling over towards Jonathan across the navy expanse of his comforter. It’s four-thirty. It’s December. It’s freezing, even through jeans and a sweater. She’s wearing a pair of his socks on her hands. It started as a joke and now she’s too warm to take them off. (Jonathan’s socks are clean and soft, soap-smelling. There’s a tiny hole by the tip of her pinkie finger).

“Yeah?” he says. Sometimes she thinks Jonathan would listen to her forever, even if she started just picking up packaging and reading the ingredients off the back.

“I go somewhere where there’s no-one else for miles,” she says. “And I just scream until my voice runs out.”

She’s not sure what she expected him to say. Give an uncomfortable laugh and change the subject, or try to comfort her, maybe.

“Me too,” he says, instead.

|

She still sees Steve at school. Rustling through his locker, stopped in the corridor by any one of a number of admiring teachers, heading to basketball practice, walking away from Billy Hargrove with his mouth twisted to the side.

She wants to go right up and challenge him. _Didn’t it ever occur to you to wonder if I was telling the truth? Like one minute I loved you, and the next I didn’t? Really?_

But she doesn’t have the right. She started loving Jonathan, so she couldn’t be in love with Steve any more. That’s it.

“Nancy,” Jonathan says at lunch, when she accidentally misses her mouth with her bottle of water, “you okay?”

She rubs fruitlessly at the little wet spot on her shirt. Steve is still across the cafeteria, listening intently to some girl whose name Nancy doesn’t even know, but is probably Marrah Mawcett. She’s one hundred percent sunshine babe, and she’s glowing in the light of Steve’s attention.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, fine.”

She’s not going to eat her pudding cup.

“You want the rest of this?” she asks Jonathan, waving it at him, but it’s too late. He’s squinting over at Steve and the general adoring mob at Nancy’s old lunch table. Nancy’s face burns.

“You’re prettier,” he offers eventually, without a hint of anger or jealousy. It’s spectacularly not the point, but it makes her reach out and squeeze his hand anyway. She deserves far worse to happen to her than to be simply misunderstood.

|

Jonathan picks her up at eight, in cords and a sweater that brings out the gold in his dark eyes. He jingles his keys in his hand while he exchanges a few words with her parents ( _just bowling; yeah, I haven’t been since Will was a kid, we thought it might be kind of funny; my mom’s doing pretty well; my college applications are almost done, thanks for asking_ ). Nancy’s mom looks at him with the same expression she gets when a rare bird comes to eat at her bird feeder – torn between fascination, tender pity and self-satisfaction. It should make Nancy mad, maybe, on his behalf, but mostly she’s just glad that her parents accepted the change from Steve to Jonathan with little more than a shrug.

Nancy has a green sweater on, and she’s left her hair soft, no hairspray. Jonathan is so busy looking at her that he misses a turn-off on the way to the alley, and it makes her smile to herself.

The girl at the bowling-shoe counter has a mouthful of bubblegum and a sour expression.

“Lane four,” she says, managing to scowl and talk at the same time.

There’s a crowd of kids in lane five; Steve among them. He’s looking down at the selection of balls, even though Marrah Mawcett is pretty clearly trying to get his attention. Nancy trails to a stop.

“I’ll get us another lane –“ Jonathan says, awkward. There’s obviously not another single free spot in the entire place. Bowling balls crash, crash, crash into pins in the background. Everyone’s laughing. 

Nancy loves him so much it’s like a vice squeezing her chest.

“No,” she says, taking his hand. “Come on, it’s fine. I think their game’s nearly over anyway. I don’t mind, if you don’t?” 

Jonathan shakes his head.

They walk to their lane and change their shoes. In Steve’s lane, a girl who isn’t Marrah Mawcett is struggling with a ball that’s clearly too heavy, but she won’t let anyone take it off her. Marrah herself is sitting at the score table. She’s in the lead.

The instant Steve notices them, Nancy feels it; it’s like fingertips tracing over her back, the unsettling feeling of someone giving a massage that isn’t forceful enough. She doesn’t turn her head.

Jonathan enters them into the scorer as JON and NON, which would be funny except he’s mortified at the mistake, and the machine won’t let him fix it.

“It doesn’t matter,” Nancy says, laughing and touching his arm. Her hand looks very small there. “Even if you’d entered me as POO I’d still wipe the floor with you.”

Jonathan makes a face. It takes her a second to get it, and then she laughs even more, her mouth opening wide.

“I swear that was an accident,” she says, and picks up a ball. 

“An _accident_?” Jonathan says, his voice strained.

Oh God. That makes her foot slip on the line, and she bowls a great big gutter ball. It’s worth it. It just makes her laugh more when the super-dramatic bold **0** is added to her score.

There’s a squeal from the next lane. Marrah – whose name Nancy really needs to learn – has just bowled a strike. The other three people on the lane crowd around her for high-fives. When Nancy allows herself a glance, Steve’s still looking over at her and Jonathan. They’re only maybe twenty feet apart, but it feels like they’re separated by a sea.

Nancy meets his eyes. She wonders what her face is doing. Steve’s expression isn’t even angry. He’s just looking over at them like they’re a place he’d rather be.

Nancy feels her mouth go into this terrible half-quirk, like an attempt at a polite _sorry_ smile that wilts on its way up. Steve’s own mouth hitches in reply, and then he looks abruptly away. Just as he does, the machine plays a jaunty little tune; Jonathan has bowled a spare.

“Hey, that was amazing!” Nancy says. Jonathan goes a little red with embarrassed pride. 

She sees, though, the moment his eyes drift away from her face and he sees Steve, just beyond her shoulder. Maybe bending over to select a ball, or lining up his shot. Jonathan's looking at him like he's an unscalable fence. It's only a split second before he looks back at her, smiles. His brow clears. It’s all neatly packed away into whatever dusty cardboard box Jonathan keeps that feeling in, shoved below the loose floorboard he avoids stepping on.

“It’s your turn,” he says.

“Okay,” she says. It feels like someone else talking through her mouth. Her mind is whirring.

Another gutter ball. In Steve’s lane, one of his basketball teammates takes his final shot. Marrah has won. Nancy can’t hear exactly what they’re all saying, but she gets the shape of it; they’re going for ice cream.

She hears Steve volunteer to take all the discarded bowling shoes back to the counter. 

“I’ll meet you guys there,” he says. He kneels over the shoes and collects them all up neatly, rights and lefts, sizes in order. 

“Steve,” Nancy says, before she can overthink it, before she can even think at all. He looks over at them, one eyebrow raised. _What, Nancy? What_ now?

“Um,” she says, and then, suddenly inspired, she clasps her right elbow with her left hand. “I hurt my arm on my last turn. And uh, Jonathan won’t get to finish his game. So, if you – I was wondering if you would –“

Steve’s mouth is slightly open. He’s still crouched over the shoes. A hundred people start and finish their games in the time it takes him to reply.

“Uh, thanks,” he says, “but I don’t want to crash your date.” _You freaking weirdos_.

“You wouldn’t be crashing,” Jonathan says. Nancy feels her heart leap up from where it’s sunk into her shoes. “It would be nice to get to finish the game.”

It’s easy to dismiss one crazy person as crazy, but clearly harder to be strong when two crazy people take up residence on one conclusion and refuse to move. Steve wavers. He glances at the bored shoe-desk girl, and at the alley doors.

“Okay,” he says.

“There’s only like four turns left,” Nancy says, even though he’s agreed already. “You’d really be helping us out.”

Nancy sits cautiously on one of the molded plastic laneside chairs, remembering to hold her “injured” arm awkwardly. Steve puts his bowling shoes back on. It’s weird. It’s so weird.

“Go easy on me,” Jonathan says, smiling. Nancy’s heart fills. She’s not even sure he knows exactly what’s going on, and he’s still going with it. Steve snorts.

“I’ve already been pounded once tonight,” he says. “I need to restore my honor.”

He selects a mid-weight ball and tests it in his hand.

“Besides,” he says, his ears flooding pink, “I’m – I’m bowling for Nancy, aren’t I? I have to try – my hardest.”

“Well, in that case,” Jonathan says. “She does hate to lose.”

Jonathan takes his turn and Steve watches with an athlete’s eye, weighing up strengths and weaknesses. When he bowls, however, Nancy isn’t sure he’s playing with all of his ability. He fudges an easy shot, and Jonathan gets his first strike.

“I thought you weren’t going to go easy on me,” Jonathan says. He’s not always the best at teasing – he’s too serious, too cautious of other people’s feelings – but he manages it now. Nancy stares, fascinated. It’s not a side of him she usually gets to see.

“I’m not,” Steve mumbles, and it might actually be the truth.

“You’re both terrible,” Nancy says, just to join in. Steve laughs, and then looks surprised at himself for laughing.

Jonathan wins in the end, with a final spare. He’s a good winner; it’s one of the things Nancy likes most about him. Steve claps him on the shoulder, and the look on Jonathan’s face hits Nancy straight in the solar plexus – the expression of someone who knows they’re living in a moment they will never get to visit again. She clears her throat.

“I’m sorry,” she tells Steve. “Those two gutter balls left you with too much ground to make up.”

Steve shrugs.

“I tried to avenge you,” he says.

Jonathan and Steve – because Nancy’s injured – carry the shoes up to the counter. Bubblegum girl snaps her gum and looks them all over with a speculative expression, as if she knows more about what’s going on here than any of them do. 

“I’m sorry,” Nancy says, as they head outside. It’s almost completely dark now. Nancy pulls her sweater sleeves down over her hands as they walk to where Jonathan parked. “Your friends must be looking for you.”

Steve shrugs.

“They’ll get over it.”

They’ve reached Jonathan’s car. Steve taps the toe of his shoe against the asphalt, and Jonathan climbs into the driver’s seat. Across the alley parking lot, three kids Will’s age are trying and failing to do ollies on one battered skateboard. Nancy leans against the side of the car and tries to think of something to say.

“Anyway,” Steve says, shoving his hands into his pockets, “it’s been… Weird. I’m just gonna –“

The car makes a whining sound.

“Oh,” Jonathan says, and tries again to turn the engine over. “The car won’t -“

“Seriously,” Steve says, “what the hell is going on here?“

Two of the kids are now sharing the skateboard, egged on by the rest of their friends. Their progress is very wobbly and unstable, but they’re giggling loudly enough to fill the lot.

“The car won’t start,” Jonathan says calmly. He gets out of the car, and hands Steve the keys. “Try it.”

Steve stares at the keys in the palm of his hand. Jonathan reaches out and grasps Nancy’s sweater sleeve at the elbow, and just holds on, like he's willing her to understand a secret.

|

The interior of Steve’s car smells like leather and pine, and the kitschy coconut air freshener that dangles from his rearview mirror. It’s shaped like a surfboard. 

“Thanks for this,” Nancy says. She hasn’t been in this passenger seat for weeks.

Steve just shakes his head. He has both hands on the wheel.

“It really wouldn’t start,” Jonathan says from the back.

“I know,” Steve says.

He takes an intersection more slowly than necessary. He always drove carefully with Nancy in the car.

“I mean, why would you pretend?” Steve goes on, as he turns up Hawthorne. Nancy’s house is coming up soon; too soon.

Jonathan meets Nancy’s eyes in the rearview mirror. Nancy’s knuckles are white on the seat.

“Do you think you can love two people at the same time?” Jonathan says.

Steve puts on his turn signal, even though there’s nobody else around, and pulls the car in to the side. A cat goes slinking across the street in front of them, eyes flashing in the dark.

“No,” Steve says, automatic, from the gut. Nancy reaches across and touches the back of his hand where it’s clutching the wheel. Steve closes his eyes.

“Yes,” he admits.

The coconut surfboard swings slightly from the rearview, caught in invisible air currents.

“Me too,” Jonathan says.


End file.
